


A Quiet Contemplation

by Heubristics



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Gen, Organizational Management, Revolutionaries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 17:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15417612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heubristics/pseuds/Heubristics
Summary: There is more to being a Revolutionary than bombing statues and beating up ministers of the state. A Revolutionary cell leader takes a moment to contemplate the challenges of organizing sedition, and the difficulties of managing a faction that is very far from united.





	A Quiet Contemplation

By all accounts, Hotshot Blackburn’s main office should have been a grandiose affair. He was Messidor, after all: infamous leader of the Messidorist revolutionary gang, director to a consortium of several of the Neath’s most exotic and far-flung revolutionary uprisings, aspirant to the Calendar Council itself! He made his lair in a remote ancient temple embedded in a massive stalactite! His halls of conspiracy thronged with alien monstrosities, beasts from the farthest reaches of the Earth, and hardened terrorists with hearts blacker than the depths of the zee! His office should have been just as ostentatious and sinister, the pulp rags agreed. Perhaps he wrote on an Unfinished beast of a desk that ate intruders and vomited their blood for use as spare ink! Maybe he walked on a glass floor beneath which was a constantly flowing river of venomous serpents! What if the walls held hidden compartments that secretly held ancient automata from the Second City, stone statues with rifles ready to fire at undesired guests with a press of a button?!

All of these were, of course, entirely ridiculous (though the possibility of an Unfinished desk had merit, he had to admit). Yes, he was Messidor. Yes, he currently made his residence in an ancient Third City sub-temple. Yes, he supposed that he did tend to make acquaintances with people that less open-minded people would call “monsters” and that some of his associates were less than morally upstanding citizens...but the office that Hotshot currently found himself in would not have looked out of place at a law firm. 

It had some comfortable chairs for extended sitting and meeting sessions. It had an entirely normal desk (maybe he should get an Unfinished version…) with plenty of room for holding important documents, supplies, and numerous hidden weapons. It had many, many folders full of important papers, incriminating documents, and all kinds of files necessary for the thankless task of overthrowing established hierarchies. It even had a delightful little mechanical toy resembling a Blue Prophet which would bob up and down to “drink” at a glass of water indefinitely on a corner of the desk. 

And right now, it had Hotshot: sitting in his chair at the desk, poring over the newest stack of dispatches from a pirate crew contact operating out of Gaider’s Mourn, and feeling rather exhausted. 

He had been looking forward to a quiet day this morning, with some time to go on a hunting expedition and then a nice evening of reading progress reports from his network. But instead he had been in the office from morning till night, doing nothing but reading reports and sending out messenger bats and frantically rescheduling meetings and dead drops and covert operations. Today, it seemed everything that could go wrong had.

First one of his Messidorist cells had reported failure in their latest statue bombing campaign due to a mix up of carts, and now instead of being blown sky-high by a cartload of dynamite the statue of the Unctuous Sub-Dignitary was merely covered with a cartload of horse manure (he grimly awaited an update on where the explosives had gone instead). Then the London Abolishment of Depravity League and Young Flit Pioneer rallies he had coordinated against a spirifer enclave operating out of Spite had broken down when the temperance marchers began to castigate the urchins on their smoking and hooliganism (they’re orphans, he wanted to shout, of course they’re going to going to have a few vices to cope!). Then he had been forced to deal with another revolutionary regime change in the Empire of Hands (the fourth coup d'état this week), report of a break down in the Sedition Engine and a complete loss of that run’s manifesto prints, the Taimen intercepting his latest round of anti-Leopard texts being smuggled into Khan’s Shadow, the loss of a Seeker cult cell who he’d sent to the Roof to negotiate with the Starved Men (one group had eaten the other, or possibly both had; he wasn’t sure), the tomb-revolutionaries from the Wings of the Obsidian Butterfly refusing to work with the tomb-revolutionaries from the Memory of the Withered Rose (the Third and Fourth Cities really hadn’t liked each other), and his most recent plan to hand out rifles to the proletariat of London foiled by February stealing all the guns he was going to give out for herself. Again.

And now this pirate crew had just set him a long-winded apologetic report letting him know that they were very sorry Messidor, please don’t think badly of them Messidor, but they had just happened to have been caught and drowned by the Royal Navy - who had by the way confiscated all of their highly illegal revolutionary texts that would take weeks to reprint and distribute - and now that they were Drownies they wondered if they might be able to... renegotiate the terms of their contract?

With a brief start, Hotshot realized he had been re-reading the same line on the port report in front of him for the past three minutes. He shook his head in an attempt to dispel the daze before sighing and laying the report down. He leaned back in the chair, stretched arms out wide, and then stood up. He walked around the room once, twice, three times before standing in the front of the desk and beginning a light workout routine.

As the daze was replaced by the clarity that physical exercise always brought, Hotshot began to wonder why he had taken the path that he had. Not the path of revolution: that reason was so obvious that it needed no consideration. But why...why all this?

What had he expected, anyways, when he made the decision to go from a lone mercenary to the lead planner of a revolutionary cell? 

Had he expected that somehow it would be just as it was before? All thrilling adventures and gunfights, shootouts with the authorities and expeditions to exotic locations, but with a few like-minded friends at his side? Had he expected that he’d just be able to gather recruits to the Cause like one would drunken zailors to a zee-voyage, stand out in public and talk about the evils of the world and people would just listen and agree?

Had he thought of all of what the consequences might be? Had he thought of the possibility of failure, even? Did he even really comprehend the emotions he would feel when he read the news of a cell he had hand-picked and trained being captured, tortured, killed? Or think of the feeling that came when a particularly close colleague disappeared entirely without a trace? Of the knowledge that by his own word, he had no doubt caused the death of some innocent being?

And even the less haunting annoyances he still contemplated. He hadn’t even thought of the work it would take, the constant back and forth of communiques and reports and coded messages. The work it would take to be constantly changing codes, changing dead-drops, updating cells on the latest constable movements and informant reveals. And the work it would take to get the socialists working with the capitalists, the anarchists working with the regime changers, the Khanagians working with the Varchans, the snakes working with the cats and the cats working with the rats and the devils working with the Church and anyone at all working with the Seekers or the Pentecosts. Why did this all have to be so bloody underground? Why couldn’t everyone just get along and agree on the need for change?

Suddenly he stopped. His body felt as though it was on fire, his forehead and arms drenched in sweat. Hotshot took the time to wipe his face with part of his jacket, breathing with mild exertion from the workout he had so furiously thrown himself into. He looked at the port report again, and sighed with a mixture of tiredness and frustration before tossing it aside. Damn the pirate crew, he’d have to make sure they were still loyal to the Cause and not the Drowning before he’d renegotiate a word of their contract. 

He sat down, and put his head in his hands. He didn’t look up when a soft knock came at the door. He still didn’t look up when the voice of the Youthful Seditionist called out, “Messidor! Newest reports from the streets!”

“Send them in,” Hotshot groaned, “Let’s see what’s gone wrong now.”

The Youthful Seditionist entered the office, their expression one of quiet concern mixed with nervous eagerness. “You might want to take a look at these ones, sir. There’s some good news in there.”

Hotshot looked up at that, but said nothing as he took the sheaf of papers and documents. He dropped the stack of papers on the desk in front of him, and then began to flip through them. Occasionally he would pause, read one further, and then flip to the next. As he went through the stack, his face went from one of frustrated weariness to tired pride.

Several Rubbery Men had recently been attacked in an Blythenhale alleyway, but had apparently fended their would-be killers off with a series of obsidian knives and hammers: the informant had recognized their markings as belonging to several Rubberies who had attended one of Hotshot’s self-defense courses in Flute Street (maybe this was the first step that could sway Flute Street to the Cause). The march on the red honey-den had resumed after the owner had come out to yell at both the League and the Pioneers: the report described in gleeful detail how the two had combined forces to both smash up the den and drag its customers (ah, now these were some interesting clients indeed…) into the public for all to see. The tomb-colonists, too, had set aside their differences when met with a group of former Navy captains with very particular opinions on foreigners and indigenous peoples. The Polythremic rebels against the King with a Hundred Hearts had just sent word back expressing their openness to a meeting, as would shortly the Iremic rebels (it wasn’t often you found revolutionaries plotting against a regime they would already have overthrown). And August wanted a word, outside of the public eye.

Lives saved. Differences mended. More recruits against the evils of tyranny, injustice and oppression of the innocent. A word with one of the friendlier Months.

Well, Hotshot supposed, maybe that was why he had made the choice he had. One man with a dream and a heart and a rifle, in a world full of pain, could never stop the flow. But many people, with many dreams and many hearts and many rifles...now, there could be something grand and beautiful indeed. 

He smiled at the Youthful Seditionist. “Well, we must be happy for the small victories sometimes shouldn’t we? Now if you could stay here for a minute, I’d like to discuss scheduling a trip to meet with these Unfinished and Individuality folks in person. And check to see if they have any desks they might be willing to lend out…”


End file.
